Watertown republican. [volume] (Watertown, Wis.) 1860-1906, 1887-03-09
A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY.

A writer in the Washington Post
gives an account of recent interview
of most remarkable character with
Edison, the inventor. In this inter.
view Edison is made to describe new
machine which he calls the nutricator.
This machine, the writer says, has &C.
complished the problem OF combin-
ing the natural elements SO
as to manufacture wholesome
food. Edison is made to say
| in this interview: "In ten years nv
machines will be used to provide the
tables of the civilized world. Meat
will be no longer killed and vegetables
no longer grown, except by savages,
! for my methods will be 80 much
cheaper" Mr.. Edison then exhibited
samples of food which he said he had
made from dirt in his cellar and from
water taken from the water-pipes in
the house. The writer says:
He led me down q pair of stairs
into light basement room, where O.
swarthy.looking man was busy about
q big machine, an iron vessel, holding
about barrel, attached to some.
thing that looked like a hydraulic
ram. The shelves were lined with
chemicals. There was g. small battery
in the corner from which one wire
went to the vat. A kerosene lamp
burned under a sort of retort. That
and four crooked pipes with handles
were all that was visible.
Chow is it, now?" said Edison.
"About 3d." replied the man. That
was all. We returned to the room
above. III shall simplify that ma
chine one-half," he remarked. "Yet
with that / can turn out at least five
tons of food of various kinds every
day. have already made eighteen
kinds OF food. 1 will tell you
something if you will not say
a word till l say go ahead
All food comes, of course, pri-
marily, from the earth. The plants
and fruits we eat comefrom the moist
ground, and the animals We eat live
on the plants, or on other animals
which the plants have kept alive. So
allfood comes from the elements stored
in earth, air and water. You eat O.
grain of wheat for instance. The wheat
Is mainly composed Of few simple
gases and salts that last year were ly-
ing dormant in the earth, the air, and
the water.
sit occurred to me that this process
might be FASTENED; that instead of
waiting q year for nature to collect
those elements into an organic seed |
could collect them in an hour, or per-
haps q few minutes, and arrive at the
same result by combining them or
ganically. This have done. first
find out what q particular kind of
food is made of. There are sixty-fve
simple elements in nature; that is sub
stances which we call simple elements,
because we have not yet succeeded in
proving them to be compound. am
afraid your readers will not generally
understand what am going to say.
Ii you use it be care III to take it down
verbatim.
"There are sixty-fve elements. Car
bon is the king of these. 1t is the
great organizer. 1t is never absent
from any plant or animal organism.
1t is at the base of almost everything.
1t is the key to my discovery, for
it possesses the peculiar capacity to
form molecules from it's own atoms.
The diamond is pnre carbon. 80 are
graphite and charcoal nearly pure
carbon, though they are so different.
Sugar and starch belong to the hydro
cartoons, and cannot understand why
their manufacture out of earth and
water hasn't been hit on before. /
form all my meat compounds by ex-
posing three elements in g. red-hot
state to nitrogen gas, though / use
different havors, which get from the
earth, too. have had to bring from
Westminster County some argillaceous
soil not found here.
ST can make wine, and have made it,
with New Jersey earth and water, that
no man can tell from Chateu Yquem.
find that those elements combine at
the lowest temperature that have the
same atomicity-that is, the same
bonds by which they unite with one
another or with compound mole
cules. This great invention has
not been shit on before, be.
cause analytic chemistry has re-
ceived too much attention to the ex-
clusion of synthetic chemistry; men
have been more devoted to learning
than to doing. Lavoisier was just on
the edge of it and missed Sir Hum
phrey Davy, Liebig and Faraday were
all in sight of it and suddenly turned
aside. They succeeded in making urea
out of the elements and several other
inorganic substances, but they stopped
at that. They overlooked the SIM
plicity of this thing.
81 think that after two CT three
| years New Workers, for instance, will
no longer eat meat or vegetables.
They will not send to the tropics for
fruits, or to Europe for wines, because
| the head of every family, by Turning a
crank Tor, perhaps, without turning q
crank, if q clock apparatus is at
tached), can produce more delicious
fruits and wines at tenth of thecost.
"Sir Isaac Newton said: 'The prop
critics of all food are in the dirt under
our feet and in the air over our heads
but they slude our grasp I was
led On by Dalton's great discovery of
the law of multiple proportions, that
the atomic weight of compounds is
the same as the atomic weight of their
ingredients. was helped also by the
| well-known law of ismorphism, that
certain groups of substances exist,